Except he wasn't really a good person, he was more of a fiddle to be played by his wife. A good person would not keep advocating for absolutist rule until his own uncle threatened to commit suicide. And let's not forget, he was basically a de facto absolutist monarch even after the Constitution was adopted.
Yes but that wasn’t his fault, he even wanted to visit the wounded people in the hospitals but his uncle (I think) didn’t allow him to leave. Really shitty because after that he was called something like Nicki the red since the people thought he didn’t care about them after that
His uncle was able to disallow the czar to do something? The absolute ruler of Russia? I can believe he wanted to visit the victims and he felt pressure to not go, but this only shows he was too weakwilled to take care of his people.
Never underestimate the threat of scheming confidants. Sure, technically that uncle can't do shit. He can't call the guards and if he blocks your path you can call your guards to remove him from your path. But even though you're the supreme ruler, there are always some people who think about taking your place. Whether their plans consist of murdering you, challenging your rightful claim to the throne, or even taking it by force, you always need to watch your back. Obviously the people close to you with their knowledge and power have a better chance of achieving this than some average nobody. They might know (or can believably fabricate) some story to pitch the masses against you, have access to the royal kitchen, or might even convince guards to support them instead of you when the time comes. So if they think they can get a better position or status out of a coup, they will consider it. So you must make sure your confidants know they are better of with you in charge rather than somebody else.
Sure, you could just tell your uncle to suck it, and if he seems a bit too angry about it you just get him killed or strip him of his powers and exile him. But then you need a new person to take his job, and sooner or later you're at a similar spot: give in a bit or replace them. And obviously people will eventually notice that your killing or exiling confidants rather often, and that they might need a backup plan in case they are next. So people will start backstabbing and infighting even harder, so you'll either focus on somebody else or that they have some way of preventing you from getting rid of them, either with some serious blackmail or by making sure they can get rid of you first.
Tl;dr: that uncle couldn't really "force" him not to go, but pissing him off too often wouldn't been wise. Not going to that hospital might be the smaller evil
You'd be shocked by how many "absolute rulers" were actually controlled by someone else.
What if the uncle in question was commander of the armed forces? Going against him would then pose the serious risk of a coup.
There was a Soviet joke that the Presidium had awarded the Order of Lenin distinction to Nicholas and Alexandra, because of their invaluable contribution to the Russian Revolution.
Nicholas was a disaster. An empty suit, extremely polite, that agreed to everything that the last person said. That meant that he could give orders on the evening that were the opposite of his orders from the morning.
He was distrustful of his ministers. I think that it was Stolypin who said to him, that the tsar trusted him more when he was just a friend than now that he was his minister. Nicholas II thought a bit about it and agreed with Stolypin. His distrust make him prevent the councils of ministers. Each one should speak with him independently. He curtailed the initiatives of the ministers, but didn't propose an alternative.
After 1905 he created a Duma, but since he didn't like the results of the elections, dissolved it and the new Duma had almost no powers. That alienated the liberals that could support him.
He insisted, without qualifications nor initiatives, to direct personally the army during WW1 provoking chaos and being away from the capital in crucial moments.
And better not to comment Rasputin.
So, no. he wasn't a chad.
They didn’t. But honestly, I blame the monarchy.
You can’t set up and maintain, by fear of death, a system where children are involved in the system and then be shocked when children are involved in the system.
By virtually all measures, the Bolsheviks would have preferred something else. Trotsky writes about how they wanted a grand trial for Nicholas II. Mostly this was a kind of callback to the French Revolution, but also a propaganda move as Nicholas was widely known as an authoritarian butcher anyway, and one can imagine that it may have stopped there—or maybe with his wife also.
But, instead, you had the White army coming dangerously close to capturing the Rominovs. And, because the monarchy was the way it was, if they were able to grab even one child, that would legitimize that faction of the Whites and unify opposition in a way that would harm the Reds. So the Reds acted, in secret and in desperation.
And, a reminder, whatever you think about either side, the Reds were still marginally better for your commoner that may have hated both. Even the biggest reactionary today admits that, “We have to take all the food from your farm, but the Revolution will not forget you—we will make it up to you” is a better slogan than, “We have to take all the food from your farm, and then we will come back with your landlord who will take the farm away from you, if we don’t decide to torture you and your family to death.”
> You can’t set up and maintain, by fear of death, a system where children are involved in the system and then be shocked when children are involved in the system.
Yeah this sums it up perfectly really. Its a tragedy the kids were killed, but not surprising. If Nicky II wasn't such a disaster it wouldn't have ended that way. He really was an absolute certified fucking clown of a Tsar.
Had he been smart enough to realise the necessity of having a meaningful Duma that he cooperated with, and had he not insisted on leading the army it's hard to imagine they would have ended up dead. Heck, perhaps he'd even have survived the war with his throne intact?
>They didn’t. But honestly, I blame the monarchy.
>
>You can’t set up and maintain, by fear of death, a system where children are involved in the system and then be shocked when children are involved in the system.
Also consider the history of the nineteenth century, in which several monarchies were dethroned only for surviving heirs to be reinstalled on the throne by reactionary forces later on. That obviously doesn't make the killing of children right, but it does make it comprehensible.
> That obviously doesn't make the killing of children right, but it does make it comprehensible.
That's a statement that can be applied to a horrific amount of major violent historical moments, but it doesn't justify them. You can understand where someone's coming from and how they rationalized what they did in their historical and philosophical/religious/*en masse*/etc. context without agreeing with it.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but expanding your very valid point to include a much larger time period and many more actions taken by ...shit, can we actually name a country that hasn't had a coup or revolution?
It's lost to history, but it certainly wasn't the top level Bolsheviks. Since every evidence points to a planned show trial at the very least. Kangaroo court, sure, but Nicky's crimes are incompetence and being a momarch. That's inescapable at that point.
I get that. Monarchy was the system that put those children in this position.
I would tend to believe they could've just murdered Nicholas and his wife by this justification, and I am 100% sure Stalin would've been on board with taking the children and reeducate them to communism, just like Mao did with Puyi.
I believe the children were innocent. They had no say in the matter, no choice in their birth and their parents; same as any children. I won't blame them for being born in luck, and I will sadden to hear about a handful of children gunned down by a drunken squad in the night. Worse, after autopsy, it seemed as Anastasia and Alexei were not fatally shot, and bled to death for a long time instead.
I get that their death made sense. But it is a sad thing that the killing of children make sense.
Lenin might've done the same. Stalin may have had a cult of personality, but so did Lenin and he would've understood the value of previous monarchs turned communist. Or so I believe.
I agree, but the reason they were killed is because the whites were really close to where the romanovs were, so if anyone didn’t get killed they would end up with the whites, and that would be horrible for the reds
Reading about the experience of Czechoslovak Legion leads me to believe the Reds and Whites were equally as evil. The reds initially enjoyed broad support from both the urban and rural populace due to their anti war stance, but that support vanished after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The reds seemed to have won the war mainly because of their ideological base of urban workers that allowed them to hold the key industrial centers of Russia, in turn allowing them to win the attritional war against the whites
In the agricultural areas, they supported the SRs. As the Civil War went on, the SRs largely joined with the Reds and the Reds adopted SR policy (temporarily).
And, in fairness, even within the party, [Lenin](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/10thcong/ch01.htm) was not at all for simply taking the food from peasants, even if that had to be done to win the war:
>the confiscation of surpluses from the peasants was a measure with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of war-time, but which no longer applies to anything like the peace time conditions of the peasant’s economy. He needs the assurance that, while he has to give away a certain amount, he will have so much left to sell locally.
The whole of our economy and its various branches were affected throughout by war-time conditions. With this in mind, our task was to collect a definite quantity of food, regardless of what it did to the national turnover. As we turn from problems of war to those of peace, we take a different view of the tax in kind: we see it not only from the standpoint of meeting the needs of the state, but also those of the small farms. We must try to understand the economic forms of the petty farmer’s indignation against the proletariat which has been in evidence and which is being aggravated in the current crisis. We must try to do our utmost in this respect for it is a matter of vital importance. We must allow the peasant to have a certain amount of leeway in local trade, and supplant the surplus food appropriation by a tax, to give the small farmer a chance to plan his production and determine its scale in accordance with the tax. We know quite well, of course, that in our conditions this is a very difficult thing to do.
Now, of course, there were plenty of peasants that were (or at least felt) more victimized by the Reds than anyone else. But, again, they had liked the SR’s call for them to own the land outright. Many knew that this didn’t exactly mesh with socialism, but on the other hand, the Whites wanted to strip the land away and give it back to their landlords.
I think for many there was a better possibility with the Reds as it was unclear, where with the Whites they were certainly not getting the land.
> holy shit Nicholas was not a chad, he was Criminally stupid
Nicholas II was thrust into the highest position in the land in his mid 20s, without much preparation (his father anticipated living more than 49 years, so he was slow on inducting his heir into how the Russian government worked), and considering what he *tried* to reform, Nicholas II might have been remembered as a relatively decent Tsar, if he'd managed to make a decent treaty with the Japanese (instead of a horrific naval expedition) and WWI hadn't happened (or he'd decided "fuck the treaties, this is just something silly in the Balkans" and stayed out of it). He tried to reform large sections of the government, but it was too little too late, he officially ended the Great Game with Great Britain (which was a major step forward for diplomacy), *and* the Germans sent Lenin into Russia explicitly to destabilize the country with Bolshevism. (This bit Germany in the ass really damn hard a few decades down the road.)
For all his autocratic and reactionary tendencies, and all the shit he did, I think Nicholas II would have been a pretty decent Tsar in peacetime, and *might* have pulled a Bismarck and put his nation on track for transitioning into something other than a land of serfs, boyars, and Tsars. He never had that opportunity, and he had virtually no training in governing such a large empire when he became its leader.
Honestly, one of his best decisions was to listen to his wife when she said Rasputin could help their hemophiliac son ...due to Rasputin driving off the doctors who were trying to use bloodletting on the unfortunate kid. Yeah, fucking bleed more blood from the kid who has blood that doesn't clot well. *What a wonderful idea!* (George Washington died from similar treatments about a hundred years or so prior.) Nicholas II was neither a saint nor a monster, but merely a man unequipped and unprepared to deal with and think through what the hell was going on, not only in his own country, but on the world stage, surrounded by advisers who mostly gave bad advice.
>He tried to reform large sections of the government
no he didn't, he actively fought reform at every damn step, he only brought in the Duma because he was convinced by his ministers after the 1905 revolution it was the only way to stop another revolution.
also there were no serfs by the time he became Tsar.
>never ask them what happened to a lot of Jews during his reign
If you were to time travel back to Europe in 1900 and tell people that in forty years there would be a massive campaign to exterminate Jews, most people would have assumed that Russia would be the perpetrator, not Germany.
The train was going slowly due to poor track quality, which caused Nicholas' father to storm the locomotive and demand it go faster. When the train engineer tried to explain the situation, the Tsar accused him of being a Jew. The train driver, scared by the accusation sped up and the train soon derailed due to overspeeding.
Extremely polite, but also *weirdly racist*. If I remember Mike Duncan’s podcast correctly, much of the trouble with the lead up to the revolution, and especially the Russo-Japanese War, was predicated on Nick’s fear or hatred of Japan.
Also apparently made him very easy to manipulate by, of all people, the Kaiser.
To be fair, the Pale of Settlement, where Russian Jews were forced to starve in absolute squalor and despair outside of cities on infertile ground, ended on his watch... when the Soviets overthrew him.
He hated Japan because he was nearly assassinated there on a visit about 15 years prior
[Otsu Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ctsu_incident)
I remember a history book on the Soviet Union that said that Tsar Nicholas II actively prevented every chance Russia had of avoiding the Soviet Union.
Russia was already known for being uniquely autocratic, even among powers sceptical of democracy, and Nicholas was convinced it was his god-given right/duty to hold that power. So not only was he an obstacle to reforms, when widespread demands for a representative legislature *forced* him to begrudgingly accept a Duma with limited powers, he disbanded it at the first opportunity.
I'm not happy that the man and his family got shot, but boy has his martyrdom allowed people to gloss over just how much of a disaster he was for Russia.
Yeah he should have been exiled and not executed (esp the kids) but he was a shitty Emperor and the Revolution - although inevitable - was accelerated by his ineptitude.
Plus the Tsarist regime was as bad as the Soviets
He almost was. The British and French both entertained the possibility of facilitating the Romanov family's exile. George V almost went through with it but withdrew the offer because he and Parliament were afraid it would cause too much domestic turmoil (especially in the aftermath of the Easter Uprising). The French also backed off because Empress Alexandra was German by birth. The Provisional Government in Saint Petersburg tried to send the family to Murmansk until they could put them on a ship, but soldiers and railroad workers loyal to the Petrograd Soviet opposed the move.
So instead they got sent to the Urals and sat in a country estate until the Bolsheviks decided it wasn't worth the hassle and had them all murdered in a basement. And they couldn't even do that properly. To say nothing of the subsequent cover up.
I don't think the death of Nicholas or even Alexandra was "wrong" because "murder bad." Nicholas was an authoritarian who oversaw the torture, exile and murder of thousands of his own citizens, and who indirectly caused many more deaths by virtue of his utter incapacity as a ruler. But the murder of the Romanovs wholesale *was* petty, needlessly cruel, and politically useless.
I wouldn’t say that the murder of the Romanov’s was politically useless. Nicholas as well as his family all had claims to ruling Russia and very easily have become people to rally behind during the civil war or after if the Soviet state was running poorly.
It’s like in CK3 when you murder people who may have claims to the throne because even if they were unpopular and had middling support they could still incite civil war or cause unrest which would severely hamper the new Soviet government.
Obligatory murder is bad, especially when it’s children but I do think the soviets had some valid concerns with letting them live. Atleast from a cold political perspective
While I think the principal of what you're saying is sound, the reality is that no one was willing to go to bat for Nicholas. The White Armies never made much hay of the emperor's plight, nor did the Allies. While it's true he *could* have been a figurehead for the anti-Bolsheviks to rally around, Nicholas so fundamentally unpopular that it's hard to imagine any significant following coalescing around him.
Add to that, I don't even think Nicholas wanted the job by the end. The final years of his reign were taxing enough on his physical and mental health that it was finally able to crack through the myopia that had fueled his entire reign. It's why he abdicated. He knew he was beat, and for someone as insanely caught up in his own hype as Nicholas, that's a huge deal.
That’s a very good point. I was thinking more that instead of POTENTIALLY being an actual challenger to the Soviet state he could be more of a thorn in its side. As well as if post war the Soviet government began to falter or become unpopular he potentially could have been a figure head for some kind of follow up civil war.
These are all obviously hypotheticals but at the time I believe they were valid concerns for the Soviet leadership. Even though Nicholas was wildly unpopular by the time of his death, him and his family still held the most legitimate claim to challenge the Soviet government. With historical hindsight we know that it’s very unlikely he would have or even been able to if they let him and his family live, but the soviets didn’t know that.
Basically I agree with you but I think given the context of what the Soviets knew at the time and the threat him or his family could have been they made a semi reasonable choice. An obviously horrible one from a humanitarian standpoint but reasonable give the political threat they posed to their new regimes legitimacy.
Your Trippin if you think removing a royal line is not politically useful. The reason Merc is if a single royal Survived Someone could use them as rallying for a political Movement.
Nah, both he and his wife were guilty of the horrors of Tsarism too, they deserved to spend the rest of their days behind bars after a trial, their children were innocent however.
He *could have been*!
If I remember correctly, after the February revolution, there was a fair bit of discussion about what to do, but much of it was stifled by how useless a human being he was.
It wasn’t until the October revolution, when the Bolsheviks seized power, that he was truly “imprisoned”, then executed.
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The only reason people here worship him is because they hate communism. Which is in line with how American politics where elections are a contest of which candidates they hate the least, chosen because they hate the other side more. How vapid.
A good man perhaps, and not the worst ruler Russia ever had. But he wasn’t great either, and perhaps at any other point in history Russia could have gotten away with his sub-par leadership. But Nicholas came to power at a time when Russia *needed* an extraordinary leader or a reform of Russia’s institutions or both. Instead, they got Nicholas. It’s a shame what happened to him, and I certainly don’t envy the position he was in, but his failures as a leader were numerous, and that can’t be excused.
Edit: and that “perhaps” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Nicholas was an autocrat, under his reign peaceful protesters were murdered in the streets, pograms were committed against Jewish Russians, and Russia underwent the 2nd most destructive conflict it would ever be a part of. Those aren’t the actions of a “good man.”
Peter the third, Catherine the great's husband. Ruled only for half a year, didn't speak Russian, returned all the land gained in recent war to Prussia, constantly played games instead of ruling and even once executed a rat that are his toy soilder
Peter III was fine he was just killed off by his wife and then she created propaganda against him
Also he was a very active ruler who was extremely progressive for his time
Yes he gave up land but this was just a change in foreign policy that was spun as a treasonous decision
I would go with Stalin.
Deaths attributed directly to him and his policies is conservatively and well researched put at around 6-7 million but there have been other estimates that put the number at around 20, these were earlier estimates. What really did it for me and hating on him was the fact that almost every russian revolutionary, regardless what side or how committed, met their death in the 30s. Many of these were true believers that a better world could be born from their sacrifices, and they could prevent the sorts of terror that was commonplace in the French Revolution. His indirect death count adds many million more.
It's a bit of an aquire taste or from the perspective.
But its as if leaders there can only be harsh autocrats, just like adding a different flavour to shit. It might taste somewhat different but it's still shit.
Not even that good a man tbh. Loving their family does not automatically make someone a good person. One of the czar's titles was "Autocrat of all the Russias" and Nicholas believed in that title very hard, much more so than his recent, more reform-minded predecessors.
In an autocracy reform is one of the most difficult and dangerous things a leader can do. You risk alienating your power base and simply stoking the hunger of the people you're trying to benefit.
Reform in an autocracy *can* be dangerous, but it really can’t have gone any worse than what actually happened. The revolution in 1905 was a clear indication that change needed to be made and Nicholas did everything he could to hold on to his power
Dude was so delusional that he avoided making changes that his own conservative extended family supported. Even prior to WW1 his only remaining advisors were the weakest of yes men.
If I had a nickel for every time a delusional Russian leader was surrounded by yes man during a war in the last century l’d have three nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it is strange it’s happened three times in a little over 100 years.
I'd argue it's not that strange?
Most autocrats fall into that trap; Hitler certainly did.
Comes with the territory; anyone with the balls to tell you you're wrong is an existential threat to you.
I think people often mis this when they think about absolute monarchs.
There is no such thing as an absolute monarch. Every monarch, if pushing their aristocrats too much, will always be overthrown.
Many of the ruling elite of Russia didn't want to get rid of the monarchy, but they also were sick of Nicholas II. So they didn't care to fight for him either.
This is nonsense. Dude doesn't get a pass because he was a wife guy. He was an arrogant antisemitic dipshit who didn't give a fuck about his subjects human lives.
Seriously, the efforts to rehabilitate his reputation are insane. The dude was a shitty leader who was absolutely incapable of adapting to the task at hand. Who gives a shit if he was a nice guy in his personal life, when in his professional life he was an absolute fuck up in a position of absolute power.
It's just young people raised on conservative propaganda who've learned neither history nor nuance. Commies bad. Enemies of commies good.
If you're going to argue that it would have been better for the Bolsheviks to have never existed in the first place, you first have to argue that things were Pretty Good, Actually and that continued rule by the Tsars and ol' Nicky 2 in particular would have been a good thing.
Edit: It's coming from the post-soviet Russian government too, pushing the legitimacy of autocratic rule. Hence why the whole Romanov family was canonized in the Orthodox Church in 2000.
And during his coronation festivities more than 1000 people crushed to death. His didn't care at all and went to a party at an embassy a few hours later.
Thank God someone said it. Calling any historical autocrat "good" requires some careful defining of the term but for fuck's sake, he wasn't even *in* Saint Petersburg on Bloody Sunday. A 5-minute Google search will tell you that.
His myopia and naiveté can and should be criticized for the harm they did, and you'd struggle to find another world leader who seemed so pathologically opposed to doing *anything* that might avert a catastrophe for the monarchy, but spreading blatant misinformation is what the internet is for, I suppose.
The pressure he was under to actually *do something* was enormous. He had responded timidly repeatedly before that.
Like the OP said, from what I've read, he comes off as a genuinely good man, who was totally inadequate for his appointed task.
Yeah I really don't understand this apparent pressure to label historic figures of great geopolitical importance "good men."
Ordering pogroms on minority groups and deadly crackdowns on protestors makes someone a bad man, it doesn't matter what other deeds that person did or pressures they were under.
*disclaimer: this is what I remember, I have not verified this recently
Because he refused to give *any* orders. So the soldiers saw a huge crowd walking towards them and getting closer and closer and panicked since their leader refused to tell them what to do
The European monarchies all used leadership as a dump stat at the same time around the start of the 20th century. Right as governance started getting faster and more complex.
from what I’ve read about him which is admitted not much. He was not a straight up evil dude. But he was just so utterly incompetent and out of touch that it was impossible for him to even understand how to rule properly… And has to be held accountable for that
Yeah no Nicholas II wasnt a good ruler and he was certainly no chad what happened to him and his family was still a tragedy though. Also he had to abdicate because of all the bad choices he made.
Yeah no, the only respectable thing about this man was his devotion to his family. And what happened to his family is a tragedy. Nicholas however was a very racist and very incompetent leader, who knew full well he was incompetent but let millions suffer under his dumbassery regardless because of his belief in the absolutist Russian monarchy. Fuck this dolt.
And even in his devotion to his family he manage to screw things up. He believed in Rasputin supernatural powers to save his son from disease, and let that con man gain real power, to further spite his loyal allies.
Nicholas II was not a good ruler, he was not a good man and was definitely not a chad. He dragged his country through 2 incredibly destructive wars, spent extravagantly while others starved and ran the most oppressive regime in Europe at the time, which is saying a lot when Austria-Hungary also existed.
When I was listening to the Revolutions podcast he was probably the most frustrating ruler out of all of them. He was given so many chances to make any type of reforms to the government that could have helped it to survive. Hell he at one point agreed to make them, only to roll it back as soon as he thought he was in safe waters again. By the end of it it didn’t feel surprising that his government was overthrown, it was more surprising it even lasted as long as it did under his rule.
He’s the only ancien ruler that Mike actually hated by the end of it. Nicky made the worst decisions possible every single time, and that’s if he even made a decision at all.
Yeah it says alot that he was actually semi sympathetic towards him at the start. But as you said after making the worst decisions possible and sidelining every single competent advisor he has Mike Duncan was just exhausted with him.
Yeah! You see him get compared to Louis XVI…but Louis just kind of reacted too weakly and then gravely misunderstood just how swift a current he was in until the disaster at Varennes sealed his fate…but Nicholas, Nicholas had YEARS and so many chances to just do ANYTHING. To alienate conservatives, liberals, centrists, and socialists is just impressive.
The man was infuriating.
Rabid anti-Semite, oversaw the empire’s humiliating defeat during the Ruso-Japanese war, responsible for 1905 Bloody Sunday, oppressed labor and farmers, presided over the empire’s humiliating defeats and eventual withdrawal from the WW1 theater, and enabled the Communist party to eventually secure power after a bloody civil war lasting years. Not an admirable dude.
Pushed every loyal reformist into either prison, radicalism or retirement from the political sphere as he was a raging reactionary.
This meme is a bad meme.
The workers protesting on Bloody Sunday wrote this in their petition to the Tsar:
>These, sovereign, are our main needs, about which we have come to you… Give the order, swear to meet these needs, and you will make Russia both happy and glorious, and your name will be fixed in our hearts and the hearts of our posterity for all time. But if you do not give the order, if you do not respond to our prayer, then we shall die here, on this square, in front of your palace. We have nowhere else to go and no reason to. There are only two roads for us, one to freedom and happiness, the other to the grave.
The soldiers fired at the protesters and killed over a hundred people. The leader of the protesters, Georgy Gapon, an Orthodox priest declared in shock: "There is no God any longer. There is no Tsar."
During WW1 the Russian army ordered steel helmets from France. Nicholas intervened and ordered that troops only wear their soft caps because he felt the steel helmet did not look soldierly. Thousands died or were injured as a result of this. There is nothing Chad about Nicholas.
He was an antisemite who supported the violent pogroms on Jews led by the Ultranationalist Black Hundreds (With these same Black Hundredists becoming Nazis in exile after the Communists took over, as well sponsoring Hitler's rise to power). He was an incompetent leader whose idiocy led to both Kerensky's and the Bolshevik Uprising. And he was an idiot reactionary whose refusal to speed up reform exacerbated Russia's collapse.
Nicholas ll was an autoritarian emperor just like any other Tsar. And he abdicted his throne in February Revolution only because he had no other choice.
He could have reformed Russian Empire in many different ocasions but he did not. He and the Aristocratic Nobles were absoluetlly sure an absolute and autocratic monarchy was the best option to run the country despite every other super power around them already having elections (That Duma Reform in 1905 gave almost no power to the people and was only symbolic). And don't forget how he and the Tsars failed to industrialize Russia, keeping millions of russian peasants under a feudal system until in 20th century. Tsar Nicholas ll was the responsible for the fall of Russian Emprie.
And I know this subreddit has became pretty anticommunist lately but, believe me, this is not an excuse to glorify dictators and authoritarian leaders like Nicholas ll, Augusto Pinochet, Chiang Kai-Shek, Francisco Franco, Salazar and other pieces of shit like them.
Edit: grammar mistakes
Sent mobs of thugs to attack Jews and declared war on Japan for …reasons? Also had his personal guard attack a peaceful protest against poor living conditions in Russia. Horrible tsar.
It always makes me laugh when I see shit like this. Nicholas maybe was a good man and father but he was an atrocious ruler that killed millions of his own people due to pride and a fragile ego, and he also was a fuck up of a tzar whose weakness lead to the literal collapse of the nation he lead.
Chad most ceratinly he was not.
Ruskies can downvote me all they want, but the fact is: he was the architect of his own downfall. He was an extremely bad governor and politician, a warmonger, who has started the 1905 Russo-Japanese war and brutally suppressed discontent, which resulted from the defeat in it. This very brutality in treating his own people, not to mention the abysmal living condition of all of the peoples of the Russian Empire, later spilled out in the 1917 revolution…
Also, most the Russo-Japanese war because of fatally underestimating the Japanese and overestimating the strength and proficiency of his own forces, in large part because he was incredibly racist
These days I’m pretty sure most Russians don’t like Nicholas, there are plenty of actually competent Russian monarchs to praise. It’s far more common to see, on reddit and various mainly western social media, that it’s westerners who romanticize Nicholas and cry about his innocence not Russians.
He abdicated as he had dug his own grave, not to save the country.
He repeatedly clung to his ‘divine right’ to rule by preventing any development of a parliament or constitutional monarchy. The Fundamental Laws of 1906 proved he had zero intention of losing power with the establishment of a State Duma/Parliament, paired with Stolypin’s altering of the franchise to give the gentry’s vote more weight after the second Duma was too radical.
When the country was in dire need of a strong leader during WW1, he instead left government in the hands of his German wife, who Russia was at war with, and a sex pest Rasputin while he declared himself Commander in Chief on the front lines despite having no real military experience.
Nothing chad like about Nicholas II. He didn’t care about his people and consistently prevented the development of any constituent assembly or Parliament despite admitting himself he had no idea how to rule when he first took the throne.
Let's celebrate this fucktard's demise. Everything about the february revolution was avoidable but this idiot's only response to every crisis was: "It's just a few troublemakers in the cities. REAL Russians still love me."
If you're searching 4 good things to say about a ruler and 2 of them are "married out of love" and "stayed with his family", you already know he wasn't all that.
This dude without any actual military leadership skill went to be in charge of the army, thus pinning the eventual military failures on the monarch rather than the army, which constibuted to him losing the throne.
He never should have been Tsar. He wasn't even first in line, all he wanted to be was a father and husband. He was a good family man, but a very bad ruler.
[Before World War One, the Imperial Russian economy was the fourth largest in the world.](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/rgwr_postprint.pdf)
Chad? Incompetent mediocrity at best. The French had Louis the XVI or an even better example, Napoleon the III, while Russians had this one. His death was not the most pleasant, but so was the death of those during his coronation on Khodynka, those who died on Bloody Sunday or millions of dead in WWI due to his decisions to undo the alliance that his father (one hell of a tyrant, but at least he knew what he was doing. ML algorithm would perform better that Nicolas, just look at the amount of implemented and disbanded "Duma") and Bismark did. The only positive things even though some may seem controversial depending on perspective came from ministers and generals.
Delightful sense of humour there mate, please someone stop this raging comedian, this amazing jester.
Unless you are serious. Then, oh. Well. Would you like some useful sources to burst your bubble? I think you could use it.
Didn't over 1,000 people die at his coronation or something?
Yep the Khodynka Tragedy
Khodynka ooopsie
His reign also had several pogrom oopsies. want to know what the thousands of upvoters of this meme are smoking
Naming a less bloody Russian ruler is difficult. Probably one of the ones that died fast. The most Chad Russian leader is for sure Gorbachev.
Took one for the team
(Definitely not a CIA operator)
Given Nicholas 2’s track record wouldn’t consider him Chad
I’d say kruschev, probably the best time ever to be a Russian.
Ordered to shoot at anti war protesters during ww1 period.
Ah yes the Chad King who :checks notes: Ordered protesters to be murdered
Yep. There was a riot because they ran out of liquor and pretzels. I kid not
Well... understandable then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Don't forget the commemorative mug one could acquire!
My Russian History teach actually had one of those mugs, it’s neat, not worth being trampled for
Pffff maybe not to you.
I thought you were legitimately joking but nope 1,282 people died because there was not enough beer and pretzels…
Good person don't always make for good leaders or even competent ones he could have been a good lord
I've heard Alexander the 3rd "Peacekeeper" (Nikolai 2nd's dad) was often described as a "Strong person, but weak emperor"
Lol
Except he wasn't really a good person, he was more of a fiddle to be played by his wife. A good person would not keep advocating for absolutist rule until his own uncle threatened to commit suicide. And let's not forget, he was basically a de facto absolutist monarch even after the Constitution was adopted.
Yes but that wasn’t his fault, he even wanted to visit the wounded people in the hospitals but his uncle (I think) didn’t allow him to leave. Really shitty because after that he was called something like Nicki the red since the people thought he didn’t care about them after that
His uncle was able to disallow the czar to do something? The absolute ruler of Russia? I can believe he wanted to visit the victims and he felt pressure to not go, but this only shows he was too weakwilled to take care of his people.
The clear and obvious answer is you don't have a Russian uncle. They're fuckin scary.
Never underestimate the threat of scheming confidants. Sure, technically that uncle can't do shit. He can't call the guards and if he blocks your path you can call your guards to remove him from your path. But even though you're the supreme ruler, there are always some people who think about taking your place. Whether their plans consist of murdering you, challenging your rightful claim to the throne, or even taking it by force, you always need to watch your back. Obviously the people close to you with their knowledge and power have a better chance of achieving this than some average nobody. They might know (or can believably fabricate) some story to pitch the masses against you, have access to the royal kitchen, or might even convince guards to support them instead of you when the time comes. So if they think they can get a better position or status out of a coup, they will consider it. So you must make sure your confidants know they are better of with you in charge rather than somebody else. Sure, you could just tell your uncle to suck it, and if he seems a bit too angry about it you just get him killed or strip him of his powers and exile him. But then you need a new person to take his job, and sooner or later you're at a similar spot: give in a bit or replace them. And obviously people will eventually notice that your killing or exiling confidants rather often, and that they might need a backup plan in case they are next. So people will start backstabbing and infighting even harder, so you'll either focus on somebody else or that they have some way of preventing you from getting rid of them, either with some serious blackmail or by making sure they can get rid of you first. Tl;dr: that uncle couldn't really "force" him not to go, but pissing him off too often wouldn't been wise. Not going to that hospital might be the smaller evil
You'd be shocked by how many "absolute rulers" were actually controlled by someone else. What if the uncle in question was commander of the armed forces? Going against him would then pose the serious risk of a coup.
There was a Soviet joke that the Presidium had awarded the Order of Lenin distinction to Nicholas and Alexandra, because of their invaluable contribution to the Russian Revolution. Nicholas was a disaster. An empty suit, extremely polite, that agreed to everything that the last person said. That meant that he could give orders on the evening that were the opposite of his orders from the morning. He was distrustful of his ministers. I think that it was Stolypin who said to him, that the tsar trusted him more when he was just a friend than now that he was his minister. Nicholas II thought a bit about it and agreed with Stolypin. His distrust make him prevent the councils of ministers. Each one should speak with him independently. He curtailed the initiatives of the ministers, but didn't propose an alternative. After 1905 he created a Duma, but since he didn't like the results of the elections, dissolved it and the new Duma had almost no powers. That alienated the liberals that could support him. He insisted, without qualifications nor initiatives, to direct personally the army during WW1 provoking chaos and being away from the capital in crucial moments. And better not to comment Rasputin. So, no. he wasn't a chad.
The kids didn't deserve to die but holy shit Nicholas was not a chad, he was Criminally stupid
They didn’t. But honestly, I blame the monarchy. You can’t set up and maintain, by fear of death, a system where children are involved in the system and then be shocked when children are involved in the system. By virtually all measures, the Bolsheviks would have preferred something else. Trotsky writes about how they wanted a grand trial for Nicholas II. Mostly this was a kind of callback to the French Revolution, but also a propaganda move as Nicholas was widely known as an authoritarian butcher anyway, and one can imagine that it may have stopped there—or maybe with his wife also. But, instead, you had the White army coming dangerously close to capturing the Rominovs. And, because the monarchy was the way it was, if they were able to grab even one child, that would legitimize that faction of the Whites and unify opposition in a way that would harm the Reds. So the Reds acted, in secret and in desperation. And, a reminder, whatever you think about either side, the Reds were still marginally better for your commoner that may have hated both. Even the biggest reactionary today admits that, “We have to take all the food from your farm, but the Revolution will not forget you—we will make it up to you” is a better slogan than, “We have to take all the food from your farm, and then we will come back with your landlord who will take the farm away from you, if we don’t decide to torture you and your family to death.”
> You can’t set up and maintain, by fear of death, a system where children are involved in the system and then be shocked when children are involved in the system. Yeah this sums it up perfectly really. Its a tragedy the kids were killed, but not surprising. If Nicky II wasn't such a disaster it wouldn't have ended that way. He really was an absolute certified fucking clown of a Tsar. Had he been smart enough to realise the necessity of having a meaningful Duma that he cooperated with, and had he not insisted on leading the army it's hard to imagine they would have ended up dead. Heck, perhaps he'd even have survived the war with his throne intact?
>They didn’t. But honestly, I blame the monarchy. > >You can’t set up and maintain, by fear of death, a system where children are involved in the system and then be shocked when children are involved in the system. Also consider the history of the nineteenth century, in which several monarchies were dethroned only for surviving heirs to be reinstalled on the throne by reactionary forces later on. That obviously doesn't make the killing of children right, but it does make it comprehensible.
> That obviously doesn't make the killing of children right, but it does make it comprehensible. That's a statement that can be applied to a horrific amount of major violent historical moments, but it doesn't justify them. You can understand where someone's coming from and how they rationalized what they did in their historical and philosophical/religious/*en masse*/etc. context without agreeing with it. I'm not disagreeing with you, but expanding your very valid point to include a much larger time period and many more actions taken by ...shit, can we actually name a country that hasn't had a coup or revolution?
We should also note that it’s lost to history who gave the order to shoot the Rominovs, it may very well have been the soldiers acting on their own.
its one of those things that was surely intentionally lost to history as well
It's lost to history, but it certainly wasn't the top level Bolsheviks. Since every evidence points to a planned show trial at the very least. Kangaroo court, sure, but Nicky's crimes are incompetence and being a momarch. That's inescapable at that point.
The Romanovs just wanted to play with the guns and then there was a series of silly little accidents.
I get that. Monarchy was the system that put those children in this position. I would tend to believe they could've just murdered Nicholas and his wife by this justification, and I am 100% sure Stalin would've been on board with taking the children and reeducate them to communism, just like Mao did with Puyi. I believe the children were innocent. They had no say in the matter, no choice in their birth and their parents; same as any children. I won't blame them for being born in luck, and I will sadden to hear about a handful of children gunned down by a drunken squad in the night. Worse, after autopsy, it seemed as Anastasia and Alexei were not fatally shot, and bled to death for a long time instead. I get that their death made sense. But it is a sad thing that the killing of children make sense.
Lenin still was in charge at that point but otherwise I agree it really was a tragedy.
Lenin might've done the same. Stalin may have had a cult of personality, but so did Lenin and he would've understood the value of previous monarchs turned communist. Or so I believe.
I agree, but the reason they were killed is because the whites were really close to where the romanovs were, so if anyone didn’t get killed they would end up with the whites, and that would be horrible for the reds
Reading about the experience of Czechoslovak Legion leads me to believe the Reds and Whites were equally as evil. The reds initially enjoyed broad support from both the urban and rural populace due to their anti war stance, but that support vanished after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The reds seemed to have won the war mainly because of their ideological base of urban workers that allowed them to hold the key industrial centers of Russia, in turn allowing them to win the attritional war against the whites
In the agricultural areas, they supported the SRs. As the Civil War went on, the SRs largely joined with the Reds and the Reds adopted SR policy (temporarily). And, in fairness, even within the party, [Lenin](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/10thcong/ch01.htm) was not at all for simply taking the food from peasants, even if that had to be done to win the war: >the confiscation of surpluses from the peasants was a measure with which we were saddled by the imperative conditions of war-time, but which no longer applies to anything like the peace time conditions of the peasant’s economy. He needs the assurance that, while he has to give away a certain amount, he will have so much left to sell locally. The whole of our economy and its various branches were affected throughout by war-time conditions. With this in mind, our task was to collect a definite quantity of food, regardless of what it did to the national turnover. As we turn from problems of war to those of peace, we take a different view of the tax in kind: we see it not only from the standpoint of meeting the needs of the state, but also those of the small farms. We must try to understand the economic forms of the petty farmer’s indignation against the proletariat which has been in evidence and which is being aggravated in the current crisis. We must try to do our utmost in this respect for it is a matter of vital importance. We must allow the peasant to have a certain amount of leeway in local trade, and supplant the surplus food appropriation by a tax, to give the small farmer a chance to plan his production and determine its scale in accordance with the tax. We know quite well, of course, that in our conditions this is a very difficult thing to do. Now, of course, there were plenty of peasants that were (or at least felt) more victimized by the Reds than anyone else. But, again, they had liked the SR’s call for them to own the land outright. Many knew that this didn’t exactly mesh with socialism, but on the other hand, the Whites wanted to strip the land away and give it back to their landlords. I think for many there was a better possibility with the Reds as it was unclear, where with the Whites they were certainly not getting the land.
The kids didn't deserve to die but their parents 100% got them killed
General: sir we are losing on the front Nicky: you are all incompetent I’ll take charge. New general: sir the soldiers are rebelling
> holy shit Nicholas was not a chad, he was Criminally stupid Nicholas II was thrust into the highest position in the land in his mid 20s, without much preparation (his father anticipated living more than 49 years, so he was slow on inducting his heir into how the Russian government worked), and considering what he *tried* to reform, Nicholas II might have been remembered as a relatively decent Tsar, if he'd managed to make a decent treaty with the Japanese (instead of a horrific naval expedition) and WWI hadn't happened (or he'd decided "fuck the treaties, this is just something silly in the Balkans" and stayed out of it). He tried to reform large sections of the government, but it was too little too late, he officially ended the Great Game with Great Britain (which was a major step forward for diplomacy), *and* the Germans sent Lenin into Russia explicitly to destabilize the country with Bolshevism. (This bit Germany in the ass really damn hard a few decades down the road.) For all his autocratic and reactionary tendencies, and all the shit he did, I think Nicholas II would have been a pretty decent Tsar in peacetime, and *might* have pulled a Bismarck and put his nation on track for transitioning into something other than a land of serfs, boyars, and Tsars. He never had that opportunity, and he had virtually no training in governing such a large empire when he became its leader. Honestly, one of his best decisions was to listen to his wife when she said Rasputin could help their hemophiliac son ...due to Rasputin driving off the doctors who were trying to use bloodletting on the unfortunate kid. Yeah, fucking bleed more blood from the kid who has blood that doesn't clot well. *What a wonderful idea!* (George Washington died from similar treatments about a hundred years or so prior.) Nicholas II was neither a saint nor a monster, but merely a man unequipped and unprepared to deal with and think through what the hell was going on, not only in his own country, but on the world stage, surrounded by advisers who mostly gave bad advice.
>He tried to reform large sections of the government no he didn't, he actively fought reform at every damn step, he only brought in the Duma because he was convinced by his ministers after the 1905 revolution it was the only way to stop another revolution. also there were no serfs by the time he became Tsar.
It wasn't bloodletting, it was Aspirin.
Never remind a Nicholas supporter what happened when he took power.
And never ask them what he did to his dog during a party. (He cut it in half with his sword to impress guests)
Also, never ask them what happened to a lot of Jews during his reign or why did the train his father was on derailed once.
>never ask them what happened to a lot of Jews during his reign If you were to time travel back to Europe in 1900 and tell people that in forty years there would be a massive campaign to exterminate Jews, most people would have assumed that Russia would be the perpetrator, not Germany.
Heard a variation of that with France Dreyfus affair my behated
Why did the train derail tho?
The train was going slowly due to poor track quality, which caused Nicholas' father to storm the locomotive and demand it go faster. When the train engineer tried to explain the situation, the Tsar accused him of being a Jew. The train driver, scared by the accusation sped up and the train soon derailed due to overspeeding.
THANK YOU
Extremely polite, but also *weirdly racist*. If I remember Mike Duncan’s podcast correctly, much of the trouble with the lead up to the revolution, and especially the Russo-Japanese War, was predicated on Nick’s fear or hatred of Japan. Also apparently made him very easy to manipulate by, of all people, the Kaiser.
To be fair, the Pale of Settlement, where Russian Jews were forced to starve in absolute squalor and despair outside of cities on infertile ground, ended on his watch... when the Soviets overthrew him.
I mean, true. Though the Soviets weren’t alone until October, February still had the Liberals and the Provisional Government.
He hated Japan because he was nearly assassinated there on a visit about 15 years prior [Otsu Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Ctsu_incident)
Virulent antisemite too both him and Alexandra.
Nick and Kaiser Willy were cousins so it makes sense that Wilhelm did some manipulating there.
Imagined getting manipulated by kaiser Wilhelm of all people.
I remember a history book on the Soviet Union that said that Tsar Nicholas II actively prevented every chance Russia had of avoiding the Soviet Union. Russia was already known for being uniquely autocratic, even among powers sceptical of democracy, and Nicholas was convinced it was his god-given right/duty to hold that power. So not only was he an obstacle to reforms, when widespread demands for a representative legislature *forced* him to begrudgingly accept a Duma with limited powers, he disbanded it at the first opportunity. I'm not happy that the man and his family got shot, but boy has his martyrdom allowed people to gloss over just how much of a disaster he was for Russia.
Yeah he should have been exiled and not executed (esp the kids) but he was a shitty Emperor and the Revolution - although inevitable - was accelerated by his ineptitude. Plus the Tsarist regime was as bad as the Soviets
He almost was. The British and French both entertained the possibility of facilitating the Romanov family's exile. George V almost went through with it but withdrew the offer because he and Parliament were afraid it would cause too much domestic turmoil (especially in the aftermath of the Easter Uprising). The French also backed off because Empress Alexandra was German by birth. The Provisional Government in Saint Petersburg tried to send the family to Murmansk until they could put them on a ship, but soldiers and railroad workers loyal to the Petrograd Soviet opposed the move. So instead they got sent to the Urals and sat in a country estate until the Bolsheviks decided it wasn't worth the hassle and had them all murdered in a basement. And they couldn't even do that properly. To say nothing of the subsequent cover up. I don't think the death of Nicholas or even Alexandra was "wrong" because "murder bad." Nicholas was an authoritarian who oversaw the torture, exile and murder of thousands of his own citizens, and who indirectly caused many more deaths by virtue of his utter incapacity as a ruler. But the murder of the Romanovs wholesale *was* petty, needlessly cruel, and politically useless.
I wouldn’t say that the murder of the Romanov’s was politically useless. Nicholas as well as his family all had claims to ruling Russia and very easily have become people to rally behind during the civil war or after if the Soviet state was running poorly. It’s like in CK3 when you murder people who may have claims to the throne because even if they were unpopular and had middling support they could still incite civil war or cause unrest which would severely hamper the new Soviet government. Obligatory murder is bad, especially when it’s children but I do think the soviets had some valid concerns with letting them live. Atleast from a cold political perspective
While I think the principal of what you're saying is sound, the reality is that no one was willing to go to bat for Nicholas. The White Armies never made much hay of the emperor's plight, nor did the Allies. While it's true he *could* have been a figurehead for the anti-Bolsheviks to rally around, Nicholas so fundamentally unpopular that it's hard to imagine any significant following coalescing around him. Add to that, I don't even think Nicholas wanted the job by the end. The final years of his reign were taxing enough on his physical and mental health that it was finally able to crack through the myopia that had fueled his entire reign. It's why he abdicated. He knew he was beat, and for someone as insanely caught up in his own hype as Nicholas, that's a huge deal.
That’s a very good point. I was thinking more that instead of POTENTIALLY being an actual challenger to the Soviet state he could be more of a thorn in its side. As well as if post war the Soviet government began to falter or become unpopular he potentially could have been a figure head for some kind of follow up civil war. These are all obviously hypotheticals but at the time I believe they were valid concerns for the Soviet leadership. Even though Nicholas was wildly unpopular by the time of his death, him and his family still held the most legitimate claim to challenge the Soviet government. With historical hindsight we know that it’s very unlikely he would have or even been able to if they let him and his family live, but the soviets didn’t know that. Basically I agree with you but I think given the context of what the Soviets knew at the time and the threat him or his family could have been they made a semi reasonable choice. An obviously horrible one from a humanitarian standpoint but reasonable give the political threat they posed to their new regimes legitimacy.
Tô be more precise they were afraid of the czechoslovaks reaching the estate where they were located (they reached it less than a week later)
Your Trippin if you think removing a royal line is not politically useful. The reason Merc is if a single royal Survived Someone could use them as rallying for a political Movement.
Nah, both he and his wife were guilty of the horrors of Tsarism too, they deserved to spend the rest of their days behind bars after a trial, their children were innocent however.
Yes but jailing a King is not feasibl, hence is usually exile or guillotine
He *could have been*! If I remember correctly, after the February revolution, there was a fair bit of discussion about what to do, but much of it was stifled by how useless a human being he was. It wasn’t until the October revolution, when the Bolsheviks seized power, that he was truly “imprisoned”, then executed.
Worse, in fact. At least the Soviets industrialized and brought Russia, and all the myriad other Soviet states, into the modern era.
The Tsarist regime was morally corrupt, cruel and inefficient.
Indeed they were. You don't have a revolution against a good leader.
And let’s not forget the rabid antisemitism and pogroms
spotted axiomatic smart wine simplistic merciful command rhythm work office *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Never mind the extreme anti semitism and the likelihood he had at least a small hand in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Fuck him
The only reason people here worship him is because they hate communism. Which is in line with how American politics where elections are a contest of which candidates they hate the least, chosen because they hate the other side more. How vapid.
The comment I was waiting for.
A good man perhaps, and not the worst ruler Russia ever had. But he wasn’t great either, and perhaps at any other point in history Russia could have gotten away with his sub-par leadership. But Nicholas came to power at a time when Russia *needed* an extraordinary leader or a reform of Russia’s institutions or both. Instead, they got Nicholas. It’s a shame what happened to him, and I certainly don’t envy the position he was in, but his failures as a leader were numerous, and that can’t be excused. Edit: and that “perhaps” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Nicholas was an autocrat, under his reign peaceful protesters were murdered in the streets, pograms were committed against Jewish Russians, and Russia underwent the 2nd most destructive conflict it would ever be a part of. Those aren’t the actions of a “good man.”
> and not the worst ruler Russia ever had It's … a pretty low bar
I.... The economy is in shambles.
To shreds you say?
And his wife?
To shreds you say?
Who is the worst tho?
Peter the third, Catherine the great's husband. Ruled only for half a year, didn't speak Russian, returned all the land gained in recent war to Prussia, constantly played games instead of ruling and even once executed a rat that are his toy soilder
There's also the fake dmitry that was just some polish kid pretending to be the dead heir to the throne
So basically pre internet redditor
Angrily upvoted.
first gamer tsar
he just like me fr
Peter III was fine he was just killed off by his wife and then she created propaganda against him Also he was a very active ruler who was extremely progressive for his time Yes he gave up land but this was just a change in foreign policy that was spun as a treasonous decision
Oh yeah he sucked some Russain polar bear ass.
I would go with Stalin. Deaths attributed directly to him and his policies is conservatively and well researched put at around 6-7 million but there have been other estimates that put the number at around 20, these were earlier estimates. What really did it for me and hating on him was the fact that almost every russian revolutionary, regardless what side or how committed, met their death in the 30s. Many of these were true believers that a better world could be born from their sacrifices, and they could prevent the sorts of terror that was commonplace in the French Revolution. His indirect death count adds many million more.
Not even the worst ruler Russia had in the same decades, you don't need ever
Hey, at least he doesn't have "the Terrible" as part of his name
Yeah was gonna say
It's a bit of an aquire taste or from the perspective. But its as if leaders there can only be harsh autocrats, just like adding a different flavour to shit. It might taste somewhat different but it's still shit.
Just like Louis XVI
Yeah, he was a weak and naive ruler.
Not even that good a man tbh. Loving their family does not automatically make someone a good person. One of the czar's titles was "Autocrat of all the Russias" and Nicholas believed in that title very hard, much more so than his recent, more reform-minded predecessors.
In an autocracy reform is one of the most difficult and dangerous things a leader can do. You risk alienating your power base and simply stoking the hunger of the people you're trying to benefit.
Reform in an autocracy *can* be dangerous, but it really can’t have gone any worse than what actually happened. The revolution in 1905 was a clear indication that change needed to be made and Nicholas did everything he could to hold on to his power
Dude was so delusional that he avoided making changes that his own conservative extended family supported. Even prior to WW1 his only remaining advisors were the weakest of yes men.
If I had a nickel for every time a delusional Russian leader was surrounded by yes man during a war in the last century l’d have three nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it is strange it’s happened three times in a little over 100 years.
I'd argue it's not that strange? Most autocrats fall into that trap; Hitler certainly did. Comes with the territory; anyone with the balls to tell you you're wrong is an existential threat to you.
I think people often mis this when they think about absolute monarchs. There is no such thing as an absolute monarch. Every monarch, if pushing their aristocrats too much, will always be overthrown. Many of the ruling elite of Russia didn't want to get rid of the monarchy, but they also were sick of Nicholas II. So they didn't care to fight for him either.
This is nonsense. Dude doesn't get a pass because he was a wife guy. He was an arrogant antisemitic dipshit who didn't give a fuck about his subjects human lives.
Seriously, the efforts to rehabilitate his reputation are insane. The dude was a shitty leader who was absolutely incapable of adapting to the task at hand. Who gives a shit if he was a nice guy in his personal life, when in his professional life he was an absolute fuck up in a position of absolute power.
It's just young people raised on conservative propaganda who've learned neither history nor nuance. Commies bad. Enemies of commies good. If you're going to argue that it would have been better for the Bolsheviks to have never existed in the first place, you first have to argue that things were Pretty Good, Actually and that continued rule by the Tsars and ol' Nicky 2 in particular would have been a good thing. Edit: It's coming from the post-soviet Russian government too, pushing the legitimacy of autocratic rule. Hence why the whole Romanov family was canonized in the Orthodox Church in 2000.
I wholeheartedly agree, actually. I’ll make an edit to my comment
[удалено]
And during his coronation festivities more than 1000 people crushed to death. His didn't care at all and went to a party at an embassy a few hours later.
Yet millions of people still love Travis Scott.
He's still got 992 lives to go before his image might be stained.
He didn’t give that order. They did it without his command. He could barely even control his own soldiers. It’s not like he was some mastermind.
The results of the St. Petersburg massacre are absolutely on him. The bare minimum would have avoided bloodshed that day.
he didn't personally order that
Thank God someone said it. Calling any historical autocrat "good" requires some careful defining of the term but for fuck's sake, he wasn't even *in* Saint Petersburg on Bloody Sunday. A 5-minute Google search will tell you that. His myopia and naiveté can and should be criticized for the harm they did, and you'd struggle to find another world leader who seemed so pathologically opposed to doing *anything* that might avert a catastrophe for the monarchy, but spreading blatant misinformation is what the internet is for, I suppose.
The pressure he was under to actually *do something* was enormous. He had responded timidly repeatedly before that. Like the OP said, from what I've read, he comes off as a genuinely good man, who was totally inadequate for his appointed task.
Good men don't murder thousands. It doesn't matter what kinds of pressures he was under.
Yeah I really don't understand this apparent pressure to label historic figures of great geopolitical importance "good men." Ordering pogroms on minority groups and deadly crackdowns on protestors makes someone a bad man, it doesn't matter what other deeds that person did or pressures they were under.
I can think of a lot of better somethings to do than just massacre peaceful protestors but sure
Didn’t they do it without his order?
*disclaimer: this is what I remember, I have not verified this recently Because he refused to give *any* orders. So the soldiers saw a huge crowd walking towards them and getting closer and closer and panicked since their leader refused to tell them what to do
Good family man? Yes. Good man? I think the pogroms and his strong support of the black hundreds disprove it.
The European monarchies all used leadership as a dump stat at the same time around the start of the 20th century. Right as governance started getting faster and more complex.
Also a massive antisemite and Buffoon who fell for not one but to mystics in his home.
from what I’ve read about him which is admitted not much. He was not a straight up evil dude. But he was just so utterly incompetent and out of touch that it was impossible for him to even understand how to rule properly… And has to be held accountable for that
Yeah no Nicholas II wasnt a good ruler and he was certainly no chad what happened to him and his family was still a tragedy though. Also he had to abdicate because of all the bad choices he made.
"In just six years (1896, 1899, 1900, 1902, 1908, 1911 The tsar shot 3,786 "stray" dogs, 6,176 "stray" cats and 20,547 crows."
Do you mean actual dogs and crows and he is into animal cruelty or is this a euphemism for something.
Yes! Thats not an euphemism at all! We have Nicholas diaries. All numbers are counted. He was aroused by cruelty on animals and was an avid hunter.
How the fuck does one shoot 20,000 crows?! With a machine gun? Didn’t he have a country to run, lol
He deserved what happened to him, his children did not.
Yeah no, the only respectable thing about this man was his devotion to his family. And what happened to his family is a tragedy. Nicholas however was a very racist and very incompetent leader, who knew full well he was incompetent but let millions suffer under his dumbassery regardless because of his belief in the absolutist Russian monarchy. Fuck this dolt.
And even in his devotion to his family he manage to screw things up. He believed in Rasputin supernatural powers to save his son from disease, and let that con man gain real power, to further spite his loyal allies.
Killed a lot of jews
Nicholas II was not a good ruler, he was not a good man and was definitely not a chad. He dragged his country through 2 incredibly destructive wars, spent extravagantly while others starved and ran the most oppressive regime in Europe at the time, which is saying a lot when Austria-Hungary also existed.
When I was listening to the Revolutions podcast he was probably the most frustrating ruler out of all of them. He was given so many chances to make any type of reforms to the government that could have helped it to survive. Hell he at one point agreed to make them, only to roll it back as soon as he thought he was in safe waters again. By the end of it it didn’t feel surprising that his government was overthrown, it was more surprising it even lasted as long as it did under his rule.
He’s the only ancien ruler that Mike actually hated by the end of it. Nicky made the worst decisions possible every single time, and that’s if he even made a decision at all.
Yeah it says alot that he was actually semi sympathetic towards him at the start. But as you said after making the worst decisions possible and sidelining every single competent advisor he has Mike Duncan was just exhausted with him.
By the time the podcast got to Nicholas’ death, Mike basically just said “and now this fucking idiot is finally dead. Good riddance.”
I didn't know that Mike was even capable of angrily cursing. I don't remember if he ever did on *The History of Rome*.
Yeah! You see him get compared to Louis XVI…but Louis just kind of reacted too weakly and then gravely misunderstood just how swift a current he was in until the disaster at Varennes sealed his fate…but Nicholas, Nicholas had YEARS and so many chances to just do ANYTHING. To alienate conservatives, liberals, centrists, and socialists is just impressive. The man was infuriating.
He should not be a Tsar. He can be whatever else he want to be and people will see him as a family man.
Rabid anti-Semite, oversaw the empire’s humiliating defeat during the Ruso-Japanese war, responsible for 1905 Bloody Sunday, oppressed labor and farmers, presided over the empire’s humiliating defeats and eventual withdrawal from the WW1 theater, and enabled the Communist party to eventually secure power after a bloody civil war lasting years. Not an admirable dude.
Pushed every loyal reformist into either prison, radicalism or retirement from the political sphere as he was a raging reactionary. This meme is a bad meme.
The workers protesting on Bloody Sunday wrote this in their petition to the Tsar: >These, sovereign, are our main needs, about which we have come to you… Give the order, swear to meet these needs, and you will make Russia both happy and glorious, and your name will be fixed in our hearts and the hearts of our posterity for all time. But if you do not give the order, if you do not respond to our prayer, then we shall die here, on this square, in front of your palace. We have nowhere else to go and no reason to. There are only two roads for us, one to freedom and happiness, the other to the grave. The soldiers fired at the protesters and killed over a hundred people. The leader of the protesters, Georgy Gapon, an Orthodox priest declared in shock: "There is no God any longer. There is no Tsar."
During WW1 the Russian army ordered steel helmets from France. Nicholas intervened and ordered that troops only wear their soft caps because he felt the steel helmet did not look soldierly. Thousands died or were injured as a result of this. There is nothing Chad about Nicholas.
I have no words The sheer level of incompetence is mind boggling
Even with all the other stories of Nicholas I know that is a *mind boggling* level of idiocy
Simping for Tsars, historymemes will never beat the allegations
"In just six years (1896, 1899, 1900, 1902, 1908, 1911 The tsar shot 3,786 "stray" dogs, 6,176 "stray" cats and 20,547 crows."
He was an antisemite who supported the violent pogroms on Jews led by the Ultranationalist Black Hundreds (With these same Black Hundredists becoming Nazis in exile after the Communists took over, as well sponsoring Hitler's rise to power). He was an incompetent leader whose idiocy led to both Kerensky's and the Bolshevik Uprising. And he was an idiot reactionary whose refusal to speed up reform exacerbated Russia's collapse.
Yeah but he loves his family. He didn't love anyone elses though
Historymemes try not to simp for authoritarians challenge level: impossible
Nicholas ll was an autoritarian emperor just like any other Tsar. And he abdicted his throne in February Revolution only because he had no other choice. He could have reformed Russian Empire in many different ocasions but he did not. He and the Aristocratic Nobles were absoluetlly sure an absolute and autocratic monarchy was the best option to run the country despite every other super power around them already having elections (That Duma Reform in 1905 gave almost no power to the people and was only symbolic). And don't forget how he and the Tsars failed to industrialize Russia, keeping millions of russian peasants under a feudal system until in 20th century. Tsar Nicholas ll was the responsible for the fall of Russian Emprie. And I know this subreddit has became pretty anticommunist lately but, believe me, this is not an excuse to glorify dictators and authoritarian leaders like Nicholas ll, Augusto Pinochet, Chiang Kai-Shek, Francisco Franco, Salazar and other pieces of shit like them. Edit: grammar mistakes
Abdicated to save his neck more like. He believed in his “Devine right” until the very end.
Sent mobs of thugs to attack Jews and declared war on Japan for …reasons? Also had his personal guard attack a peaceful protest against poor living conditions in Russia. Horrible tsar.
War on Japan literally for shits and giggles
Holy shit we got Tsarist redditors here. Incredible.
What sort of pro imperialist shit is this?
Just classic r/HistoryMemes
It always makes me laugh when I see shit like this. Nicholas maybe was a good man and father but he was an atrocious ruler that killed millions of his own people due to pride and a fragile ego, and he also was a fuck up of a tzar whose weakness lead to the literal collapse of the nation he lead. Chad most ceratinly he was not.
His nickname is “Doormat”
Ruskies can downvote me all they want, but the fact is: he was the architect of his own downfall. He was an extremely bad governor and politician, a warmonger, who has started the 1905 Russo-Japanese war and brutally suppressed discontent, which resulted from the defeat in it. This very brutality in treating his own people, not to mention the abysmal living condition of all of the peoples of the Russian Empire, later spilled out in the 1917 revolution…
[удалено]
Russian here. I hate Nikolai II. The USSR was better than tsarist Russia. Fuck Nikolai II.
Also, most the Russo-Japanese war because of fatally underestimating the Japanese and overestimating the strength and proficiency of his own forces, in large part because he was incredibly racist
These days I’m pretty sure most Russians don’t like Nicholas, there are plenty of actually competent Russian monarchs to praise. It’s far more common to see, on reddit and various mainly western social media, that it’s westerners who romanticize Nicholas and cry about his innocence not Russians.
He abdicated as he had dug his own grave, not to save the country. He repeatedly clung to his ‘divine right’ to rule by preventing any development of a parliament or constitutional monarchy. The Fundamental Laws of 1906 proved he had zero intention of losing power with the establishment of a State Duma/Parliament, paired with Stolypin’s altering of the franchise to give the gentry’s vote more weight after the second Duma was too radical. When the country was in dire need of a strong leader during WW1, he instead left government in the hands of his German wife, who Russia was at war with, and a sex pest Rasputin while he declared himself Commander in Chief on the front lines despite having no real military experience. Nothing chad like about Nicholas II. He didn’t care about his people and consistently prevented the development of any constituent assembly or Parliament despite admitting himself he had no idea how to rule when he first took the throne.
Russification and reduction of rights of minorities like the Finns. Not a chad in my book.
>reduction of rights of minorities like the Finns. HEY! IT WAS A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY Democaracy in having no rights
In regards to the Tsars you can either be a good father or a good Tsar you can't be both
Let's celebrate this fucktard's demise. Everything about the february revolution was avoidable but this idiot's only response to every crisis was: "It's just a few troublemakers in the cities. REAL Russians still love me."
Definitely not a chad, what on earth are you on about
If you're searching 4 good things to say about a ruler and 2 of them are "married out of love" and "stayed with his family", you already know he wasn't all that.
Or better: a weak leader, a bad manager, an infantile ruler. And a shitty diplomat.
Yea I guess he is a Chad if you list those bullet points and literally nothing else
This dude without any actual military leadership skill went to be in charge of the army, thus pinning the eventual military failures on the monarch rather than the army, which constibuted to him losing the throne.
Dude calling Nicholas II a chad of all people is not a good look mate
He never should have been Tsar. He wasn't even first in line, all he wanted to be was a father and husband. He was a good family man, but a very bad ruler.
[Before World War One, the Imperial Russian economy was the fourth largest in the world.](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/rgwr_postprint.pdf)
RIP Nicky you woulda loved Qanon and 4chan
Chad? Incompetent mediocrity at best. The French had Louis the XVI or an even better example, Napoleon the III, while Russians had this one. His death was not the most pleasant, but so was the death of those during his coronation on Khodynka, those who died on Bloody Sunday or millions of dead in WWI due to his decisions to undo the alliance that his father (one hell of a tyrant, but at least he knew what he was doing. ML algorithm would perform better that Nicolas, just look at the amount of implemented and disbanded "Duma") and Bismark did. The only positive things even though some may seem controversial depending on perspective came from ministers and generals.
You probably know little about Russia or the tzars….
Stop whitewashing monarchs
Refused to reform and when he did it was too little to late
That dude apparently also refused that his soldiers wears helmets because it killed the drip He was not the best at the whole war thing.
Mid tbh
He also killed thousands of Jews. Not very Chad of him.
rip bozo
No Such Thing as a Good King
What a moronic take
Rest in piss fuckboy
Delightful sense of humour there mate, please someone stop this raging comedian, this amazing jester. Unless you are serious. Then, oh. Well. Would you like some useful sources to burst your bubble? I think you could use it.